The Jaipur Dialogues: Jaipur's Civilisational Discourse Platform
The Jaipur Dialogues is a digital media and public-discourse platform based in Jaipur, Rajasthan, publishing news commentary, long-form interviews and cultural content at thejaipurdialogues.com and across video and social platforms. Founded in 2016 by Sanjay Dixit, a retired Indian Administrative Service officer of the Rajasthan cadre, it began as a physical event in Jaipur and grew into an online platform — run by JD Digital — with a large YouTube following, podcasts, and an annual flagship summit in Jaipur. Its stated premise is that Bharat deserves a space where its history, culture, philosophy, traditions and contemporary challenges can be examined from an Indic perspective, and its programming ranges across politics, governance, national security, foreign policy, economy, education, culture, history and social issues.
Founding in 2016
The Jaipur Dialogues Forum was established as a non-profit initiative in 2016 by Sanjay Dixit, who had joined the IAS in 1986 in the Rajasthan cadre after earlier working as a marine engineer in the Merchant Navy. Dixit started the platform to address what he saw as deficiencies in India's national discourse, creating a forum for intellectual discussion of Indic culture, history and public affairs. Early activity centred on physical gatherings in Jaipur — panel discussions and sessions on dharmic culture and Indic narratives — held in a city already famous for the Jaipur Literature Festival, which had begun a decade earlier in 2006. The Dialogues positioned itself from the start as a counterpoint in that same city: a festival of ideas built around perspectives its founder believed the mainstream festival circuit excluded.
Sanjay Dixit and JD Digital
Dixit remains the platform's president and public face. After a civil service career spanning more than three decades in Rajasthan and central government roles, he turned to writing and commentary full-time, authoring the Krishna duology — Krishna Gopeshvara and Krishna Yogeshvara, published by Garuda Prakashan — and Unbreaking India: Decisions on Article 370 & the CAA. The platform's digital operations run through JD Digital Private Limited, based in Jaipur, which operates the website, the video channels and the summit, and sustains them through subscriptions, donations and an online store. That structure — a non-profit-style forum with a digital media company executing it — allowed the Dialogues to keep publishing daily content between its annual events rather than existing only as a once-a-year conference.
From Physical Event to Online Platform
The platform's own history, as Dixit has told it, is a journey "from 0 towards million": the Dialogues started in 2016 as a physical event and took the form of an online platform under his leadership, a shift the Covid period accelerated when the dialogues retreated to online mode for two years before resuming physically. YouTube became the engine of that growth. Long-form conversations with scholars, journalists, diplomats and public intellectuals — on Hindu civilisation, foreign policy, internal security and contemporary Indian politics — gave the platform a national and diaspora audience far larger than any Jaipur hall could hold, while the website thejaipurdialogues.com carries its articles, commentary and event information alongside.
The Annual Summit
The Annual Summit is the platform's flagship. Staged over multiple days in Jaipur, it convenes thought leaders for keynotes and panels on national security, civilisational history and Indic perspectives, and has established itself, in the words of one magazine account, as an unmissable event on the Dharmic calendar — a gathering addressed by nearly ninety speakers in its post-Covid physical editions. The 2024 summit, themed "Reclaiming Bharat", ran from 25 to 27 October at the Clarks Amer hotel in Jaipur and was inaugurated by Rajasthan Governor Haribhau Bagade, with sessions on geopolitics, historical reinterpretation, education reform, media and civilisational challenges. The 2025 summit, themed "Shatrubodh" — strategic awareness of adversaries — followed at the same venue from 7 to 9 November, opened with speakers including historian Meenakshi Jain, and published a speaker roster running to well over a hundred names from academia, the military, media and public life.
Themes and Programming
The summit schedules show the platform's editorial range in miniature. Sessions in 2024 addressed challenges to Bharat and Sanatana Dharma, the future of India's political alliances, internal security, reclaiming civilisation, temples and history, radicalisation and the Khalistan issue, narrative warfare across Bollywood, OTT and social media, the contest between media and social media, history and education, and strategic economy and the deep state. Panellists have included retired security officials such as S. P. Vaid and Major General G. D. Bakshi, historians such as Meenakshi Jain and Vikram Sampath in the wider summit circuit, commentators such as Anand Ranganathan, R. Jagannathan and Abhijit Iyer-Mitra, and public figures from politics and law. The Deccan Summit in Pune in February 2025, themed on Hindu unity, showed the format travelling beyond Jaipur while keeping the same session architecture of panels, hosts and thematic debates.
Position in India's Festival Landscape
Commentary on the platform, notably in Swarajya, frames the Jaipur Dialogues as a deliberate answer to the Jaipur Literature Festival: where JLF was seen by its critics as a platform for what they call Lutyens liberal voices, the Dialogues were "pioneered" to tell the other side of the story, joining a wider family of newer festivals — the Festival of Bharat and the Mangaluru and Pondicherry literature festivals among them — built to carry dharmic perspectives. That positioning is central to the platform's identity and its audience loyalty: it does not present itself as neutral ground but as a narrative-building space, openly dedicated to Hindu civilisational perspectives and to networking among the writers, scholars and activists who share them.
Audience, Channels and Support Model
The Dialogues maintains one of the more complete multi-platform presences of any Indian discourse outlet: YouTube as its primary stage, alongside Facebook, X, Instagram, Spotify podcasts, Telegram and WhatsApp channels and community groups. Because its funding is community-based, its videos and site carry unusually detailed support appeals — subscription plans through JD Digital, donation routes, and an action fund — asking viewers who believe in the project to become, in its words, pillars of an Indic renaissance. This supporter economy aligns the platform's incentives with its audience rather than with advertisers, and it has underwritten both the daily video operation and the scale of the annual summit.
People and Controversies
The platform's people occasionally cross into wider news. In the 2024 Lok Sabha election, Sunil Sharma — identified as a partner and director of the Jaipur Dialogues — received a Congress ticket for Jaipur, prompting political commentary, including a public jibe from Shashi Tharoor, about the ideological distance between the platform's known positions and the party that fielded its director. The episode underlined how firmly the Dialogues brand is associated in public life with its civilisational politics. Dixit's own commentary and books keep him a quoted voice on Rajasthan and national affairs, and the platform is regularly covered by national media when its summits convene.
The Jaipur Dialogues Today
A decade after its founding, the Jaipur Dialogues has grown from a single Jaipur event into a layered media institution: a website publishing commentary and interviews, a high-volume video platform, a podcast presence, a merchandise store, an expanding summit circuit that reached Pune in 2025, and a flagship Jaipur summit whose published rosters now run past a hundred speakers. Run by JD Digital from Jaipur under Sanjay Dixit's presidency, it remains what its founding premise declared — a civilisational platform dedicated to examining Bharat's heritage and future from an Indic perspective, with the annual summit as its statement piece and the daily digital operation as its continuing voice.
